The world rumbled and shook for two whole days before the earthquakes stopped.

I could not sleep at all on the first night, but by the second, I wasn’t able to keep my eyes open. Most of us had thrown up multiple times, and I had a splitting headache that wouldn’t go away.

I had been scrambled through and through, and when the quaking ceased, the steady ground almost felt abnormal. This first time standing up after the shuddering ended, I fell back down again, as did Lucas and Maria. Our legs were shot and our balance was temporarily ruined. We sat for over an hour after it was over, waiting with dread for an announcement that never came.

Eventually I worked up the courage to walk around. What I saw wasn’t unexpected: the entire community was devastated. Not a single building remained standing, it was one hunk of rubble that provided no more shelter.

The monsters that were missing hadn’t respawned yet, and that led our discussion to the theory that we were in for a big restructuring. Lucas started to refer to the event as an expansion. Even Thomas caught himself calling it a patch.

It wasn’t just our home that had been wrecked, but as far as the eye could see, all remnants of human civilization had been destroyed. The towering city in the distance was now just debris that stacked up to two stories high. Anyone who was still alive there would have found it hard to escape.

The world that had recently been becoming brighter in my eyes had returned to a hellscape: one that was quickly becoming uninhabitable. The leisurely lifestyle we had experienced these past six weeks vanished overnight, and anything not in our inventory at the time had been thoroughly destroyed.

“Looks like we’re back to sleeping under the stars,” I said. That got a sour look out of those within earshot. As a matter of fact, what with the lack of rain and the sunlight in the morning, I felt that my sleep the previous night had been the best I’d gotten in months. “What now?” I threw the question into the air.

I looked around at the faces of uncertainty. We didn’t have any objectives to go by, nor any direction to travel. “Let’s head for the road.” Lucas said, “at least that gives us a direction.”

No one disagreed. The road or here, there was no difference. At least traveling the road would lead us to the next city or town; we could see the scope of this event. We headed for the nearest highway, cautious of our surroundings.

Things became odder as we walked. The world had changed in more than just its destruction. The insects that had previously assaulted us were nowhere to be seen. The occasional singing of a local bird didn’t bless our ears. All was silent. Dead silent.

“Has anyone seen any animals at all?” Jessica asked. I hadn’t seen so much as a lizard, or any life form at all in fact. There was just nothing… and even when I used my necrotic vision to scan for any life at all in any direction, it came back empty.

A looming dread spread over the group that Alan tried to quickly suppress. “Maybe they fled during the earthquake?” He offered up a solution.

My feeling of hope lasted only a brief moment before it was squashed by logic. “Was anywhere outside the earthquakes?” Glenn asked. “There was nowhere safe, clearly. We should see something.”

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“Are we the only ones left?” Maria asked.

“That’s even more unlikely,” Lucas replied, brushing her idea aside firmly, “this is a change in the system and the system wants players in this game. For them to eliminate all the other players but us makes no sense.”

We had paused in contemplation, and I moved towards the nearest tree. There was thick black dirt at the base of the trunk. Roots protruded out of the soil ever so slightly. Just enough to trip over if you were moving too quickly past.

I leaned down and dug my hand into the fresh soil, but scoop after scoop came up empty of life. Not the smallest bug, or worm, or even anything at all. There wasn’t even fungus beneath the soil. Just a gritty, bleak blackness that sullied the hands.

I shook my hands and brushed them against my pants before standing and turning back towards the others. “Careful!” Jessica suddenly yelled at me. My heart started racing immediately as an ominous feeling rushed up through my legs. I leaped forward without the slightest bit of hesitation, barely dodging whatever was coming for me.

The earth ripped behind me as I tumbled forward. The dense roots ripped like paper and provided almost no resistance to whatever was forcing its way through the ground. I turned as I rolled to see a gigantic worm, towering eight feet high.

It swayed there like a tentacle. Something so simple looking was absolutely terrifying when such a great size. There were no eyes on its head, and its mouth was a closed opening that occasionally protruded with endless sharp teeth.

The body was sleek and pink. Black dirt fell off in sloughs that revealed its see-through skin. The veins where blood flowed were clearly visible, and even the heart pumping midway down its torso was easy to see.

Alan and Richard rushed past me before I could even get to my feet and by the time I had scrambled clear they had clobbered it into a bloody mess. While huge, it didn’t seem to be very strong.

“Did monsters like this always exist?” Anna asked. I’d never seen one. Before this fiasco, worms had remained normal sized; the same with insects and birds and animals and everything else.

Several days ago the trees were filled with lizards and birds, and the soil had worms and fungus and mushrooms growing from it. Now it had a giant earthworm the size of a full-grown man in it. What else had changed?

“Is the entire world becoming gamified?” Alan disheartened tone indicated his belief things were changing for the worse. I felt that it could be true. Perhaps the whole world had been reorganized to become more of a challenge for those of us who had survived this far. If that was the case, the worm was just a signal that things were only going to grow more difficult.

Our trip to the road was made with heavy hearts. My hopes of finding some kind of shelter still standing disappeared as we walked past nothing but ruined farms and barns. The seemingly harmless day-to-day life fauna was now trying to kill us, and who knew what else had been added during this change?

The only silver lining currently was our new support class Glenn, whom seemed to have the ability to build structures. Looking at the debris around us, finding anything manmade now would probably be impossible.

The road was a cobbling of asphalt that was now uneven and full of deep fractures. It wasn’t even possible to walk on it anymore. Instead, we walked alongside the road. It still provided a path forward, so that we wouldn’t end up going around in circles. From the position of the sun, I estimated we were moving northwest.

No one even asked which direction to go. Going back towards our old haunts didn’t seem like a smart option. Surely the city was more dangerous than what we’d face in farmland? Our party was stronger than ever. Jessica and I had reached level twenty-six. Everyone besides Mark and Glenn were level twenty-four or twenty-five. Mark and Glenn made some headway in the two weeks after hitting level ten and were now level fourteen each.

We were strong, strong enough to face whatever came… I hoped. “It looks like the world is forcing us out into the open,” I said.

“They don’t want us hiding away anymore.” Jessica agreed.

“Anyone who was tucked away and surviving off supplies is probably a goner.” There was obvious doom and gloom in Anna’s voice.

I couldn’t help but think about the trailer park. There had been a surprising amount of older folk bunkered down there. I hoped they fared better in those trailers than anyone hiding away in a city. I took one last look back at the ruined landscape on the far horizon and then turned forward—there was no going back now.